If you’re following my blog, you’ve probably seen many of these photos. Its how I start the majority of my oil and cold wax pieces, with a layer of black to set in some initial composition pieces as well as scratches and mark making for subsequent layers.

This scene was captured at the Spotted Cat Music Club in New Orleans. My process for this piece was very much like all my the previous New Orleans paintings where I started with a loose sketch of shapes. This sketch was actually a little bit more detailed than usual because the piece and figures are larger than most of the other pieces in the series.

This 24x36 piece took twenty hours to complete. I started and finished this one while I was struggling to complete Cafe Du Monde, which is pretty crazy if you look at all the detail just in the balconies and ladders. Anyway, you can see I began this piece with a very simple drawing, just using basic shapes and no real detail.

This 24x30 painting was completed around the same time as "Cafe Du Monde" and "Pirate's Alley" were in the works. This piece took just over ten hours to complete, about the same amount of time as "Cafe Du Monde," which is a testament to how hard of a time I had with that small painting.

This scene was captured in Maison, a bar on Frenchmen street in New Orleans. This 18x20 piece took just under 10 hours to complete. I seemed to have forgotten to snap a photo of just the sketch before I put any paint on it but luckily you can still pretty much see what the sketch looked like in the first photo; loose and basic shapes.

This piece, as small as it is, was one of the more challenging of the NoLa series. It took over ten hours to get it to a place where it felt complete. I struggled mostly with keeping the overall feel to the piece loose and painterly; not so much like a photo, mostly all the people under the tented area of the cafe but you can also see some tightness in the tent itself as I had to repaint that a few times.

These photos show the major steps of one of the first few pieces in my New Orleans series. This 24x36 piece took slightly over 20 hours to complete. Just like in The Biker, I start out with the grid system as I find that the simplest way to draw out a complicated subject.

This commission was based on an excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The client essentially gave me the page he wanted from the book and told me to paint my visual interpretation.

This painting took me just over ten hours to complete. It was not done in one sitting but rather multiple sessions of an hour or two at a time. These photos show the process of this painting which is part of my New Orleans series.